Twilight Sparkle, second degree magician
by tempboy
Summary: A mixture of My Little Pony and a knowledge of the occult, a bit of a breather while working on a more serious original story. Also, it's set about 100 years in the past, Relatively.
1. life before death

THE CASE OF THE CONSTANT SUICIDES New Horrors in Ponyville PONYVILLE, APRIL 23, 1914 - The inspector of the Ponyville Police Force is facing a mystery more terrible than anything in the tales of any popular horror, as three inexplicable suicides in a fortnight have occurred in an area adjacent to Everfree Forest - an area which the countryfolk have recently insisted is haunted, not just by our famous local Monster, but by creatures even weirder and more fearsome.  
The first mysterious suicide was that of G.P. Trotsanna, 25, who tragically shot himself through the head last Thursday. She was in good health according to neighbors, and no rational motive for the act of desperate melancholy was revealed at the coroner's inquest.  
The second victim of this eerie plague of self-destruction was the first's sister-in-law, Mrs. Barley Trotsanna, 37, who took her own life by drinking iodine poison this Monday. She is survived by her husband, Rev. 'Thumper' Theodore Trotsanna, the well-known pastor of the antique and lovely Old Kirk by the forest and president of the Society for the Propagation of Shining Truth.  
Today, the third terrible and inexplicable tragedy occurred and was linked by strange coincidence with the first two acts of melancholic mania. Rev. Clyde Mowing, brother to Mrs. Trotsanna, and vice-president of the Society for the Propagation of Shining Truth, cut his own throat with a razor.  
It is difficult to understand how such a contagious wave of insanity could strike a family devoted to pious endeavor in the name of the princess. When questioned about this, the inspector told our reporter, "When you have been a member of the police force for thirty years, you see many bizarre tragedies and learn that literally anybody is capable of literally anything."  
The country people, however, say that the area where Everfree meets the town - where the Trotsanna and Mowing households are located - has been "haunted" for many years now. They instance the many appearances of that beast, the mysterious serpentine monster in the forest, as well as tales of a bat-winged second monster, strange noises and lights at night, buzzing voices heard in lonely spots, and many other varieties of supernatural apparitions.  
"There is much superstition among the countryfolk," the inspector said when queried about these frightening tales.  
Other residents regard the Inspector's skepticism with the strict rule of no wife, no horse, no mustache, always anger and derision.  
Granny Smith, 61, who owns a farm near the reputedly haunted area, told our reporter, "The police are - fools. Every colt, mare, and filly in these parts calls that land 'The Damned Acres' and nobody will go into it after dark. Our beast is the least of our worries. The ungodly sounds at night around there, and the lights in the sky and on the ground, and the monstrous creatures people have seen, are enough to make your hair turn white."  
Another farmer, who asked that his name be withheld from publication, added more grisly details to Smith's macabre tale, saying that his own son had encountered one of the "monstrous creatures" two years ago and is still under medical attention. He refused to describe the creature, saying, "City folk would laugh at us."  
Another farmer, 43, another farmer, sums up the country people's view, saying, "we do not need a policeman as much as we need a witch-finder." He claims to have seen a woman without a head walking on the grounds of the Laird recently.  
"Superstition," says the inspector; but our reporter admits he was glad to be back in the city before night came down on "The Damned Acres."

From the private diary of Twilight Sparkle-  
What kind of pony is she, or what creature in the form of a pony? True, I have only met her in the flesh two times, but he has been a perpetual presence in my life for these two years now- since I bought that accursed tome and became drawn into the affairs of that part of the royal family and the horrors in the Everfree forest. Even before the blasphemous incident of that damned symbol that drove me out of Ponyville completely, she haunted my sleep, appearing in the most grotesque forms in constant nightmares that verged on sheer delirium. That one hideous vision in particular continues to haunt me - she was wearing an interlocking crown, while all about her danced and piped a crew of insectoid ponies that only the most grusome artist could depict. Like King Neighear, I would fain cry out, "Apothecary, give me something to sweeten my imagination!" But this is not imagination; it is horrid reality. I still recall her last words to me in the capital, as absurt now as ever: "Your Goddess and and princess are dead. Our magick is now stronger, for the Old One has returned." Sometimes, almost, my faith wavers and I believe her. That is the supreme horror: to be drawn passively, without further struggle, all hope gone, to that which I dread most, like one who stands at the edge of an abyss and cannot resist the seductive demoniac voice that whispers, "Jump, jump, jump. . ."

The twinkle of Twilight Sparkle's horn flips pages manically in a search for the tidbit of advice needed for a delicate operation. She reads from her personal notes, carefully maintaned since, was it, the second to last year of school? No academia here resides, infact, to the average scholar and layman alike the knowledge within presents a field typically unregared, though ever present. To simply read of it would give clear ideas as to its purpose, the question then becomes for whom would such a text be needed? The pages roll faster than their sound, the crisp flick of their rise and fall is no less than the sound of the mare combing the laws and their inverses in her mind, the occasional glanced word only an aid to memory. On being pressed for a describtion only would any reader of these questionable observations rule them as laws of interaction. The scope of the work is much more ambitious that this, and it's tone of a more pressing intent than avoiding offense with friends and collegues, though this less trying persute would as well be mastered by milder dedication to those pages. It is select the number in Equstria that can identify the activity taught there in, and any scholar of any merit two hundred years ago or noble of any age would risk hoof and hide should there be a chance to simply READ the secrets within, instead of learning them the hard way. Those in the know, however, would mark it simply as the act of courting, of being and being in the service of the powerful, then read on greedily. And just then, Twilight found just what she needed.

Wisdom: do not speculate towards what may be known to others.

Twilight wrapped about her her scarf, and wasting not a second teleported herself to the courtyard of the twin castles of Equestria, mind set to wording and working, and truely, as any who may know the prediciment and the presedure, there was not a second to loose.

Twilight Sparkle is recognized by the court, and says she in greeting of noon, 'Hail unto Thee in Thy triumphing,  
Even unto Thee in Thy beauty,  
Who travellest over the Heavens in Thy ark At the Mid-course of the Sun.  
Hail unto Thee from the Abodes of Morning!',

her expression locked, the small unassuming smile of the perfect courtier in seeing once more, though only by perhaps a dozen hours, her most adored madame. Behind this, she laments the need to break such fundimental laws to right this mistake, releaved only by the general genteel with which Celestia handles her; she is but a young scholar, after all; any thought that perhaps power is the application for the student's intellect and vigor is one far from any conversation, but the filly gloves, as they say, had gone somewhat tougher in time as it comes nearer to when Twilight will truely be in her misstress' service.  
As the final bouncing call of -ing resonates the hall Twilight's reserved smile touches her eyes as she draws in to the throne. This greeting for the Sun was one only known only to magicians trained by Celestia's magical order, The Gilded Rise, this confidence prided her as much as what it represented, her assent to the second degree of her initiations. "My most precious protege," aural rose petal infused honey senses exclaim, "Always a pleasure. Could Luna and yourself keep yourselves engaged last night? I take it by your current presence she didn't have you up but a few hours past my own bed time."  
Twilight had felt some hesitation in really meeting Luna, in the past months since her return, she had felt something sinister about the monarch, seemingly confermed by uncomfortable visions during her introduction to the magical art of astral travel, in which she had had several bazaar encounters with what could only be some projection of her pregidis, or some evil pretending to be Nightmare moon. She had tryed to dismiss these none sensical notions, again and again, but still they lingered at the edge of her mind.  
"Mmhm. Immortality and absence create so many mutual questions there is but a limit of endurence to our conversations." "Splendid. I know that before last night you two had, conversed, but I'm so happy to see there is no hitch."  
" Perhaps one.." NEVER deliver bad news, or else be bad news.  
In this moment between lines in the dialogue Twilight had no doubt would arise, she orders once more the lies she will begin to pile, and upon not fliching in the face of each offense against her report with the princess(es?) she will surely suffer, and whats more the consequences should she fail.  
"Oh?" Bleached bone barreness, the death of all born. Fear is failure...  
"A faol pas, and now I hope vainly for a cure before dusk." Fear is failure...  
The princess, without movement or sound, shows for her student to continue. "I think I might have really hurt her feelings," From her misstress' face melts some sterness, however, the loss is lost. "I, accidentally, of course, almost called her"  
"Nightmare Moon." Celestia completes over her fading pupil's voice. NEVER take the blame. Fear is failure and the forerunner to failure.  
"Yes." Thankfully, The Goddess' features softened. Twilight's plan, or providence, or the Goddess herself, saved her. The trespass was much greater than the slip itself, but the result, she knew, was the same but in magnitude. "Princess Celestia" Twilight does not complete once more "Would I help you mend your mistake?"  
"Yes." NEVER ask for favors (she and her friends all laughed when they realized the generousity of their Princess when they had all gone to the Gala, who may have as well, but Twilight knew humility shined well.)  
"Without doubt. However, you should know, that my want for amiciablity isn't selfless. Cooperation between the two of you could be valueless. You will fix this." No forboding strikes, and the inappropriate 'could be' never addressed. "Yes m'lady, I feel quite bad, we were having such a wonderful time."  
Yet more Celestia's face, as evidently her heart, softened, as would anyone who would observe the teacher and student as I do would expect.  
"I know you would. Now," She says, shining noon light reflecting from the curling lip brought by an ancient reminesence of living, as that was what it was, given but what was in respect short interruptions, life was in many ways Luna. She did want to make her student and sister feel better, so she supposed she knew;  
"You know what you could do, though tonight's dusk is quite out..."

That happened a long week ago. Not hard, just long. Twilight had never done work with Pinkie Pie before. Her understandable weariness had been recovered in the finial stage of her preparations, a relaxing night to herself after a somewhat more stressful one without sleep, not the first, as any involved scholar may recall the terror of the creeping blue dawn while particularly ingrossed. Now indeed did the birds of morning, having no doubt broken their fast with her pale honey complected friend, cry out their sounds warning to those that would ally themselves with night and its goddess, a service lost in their traditions, a secret to puzzle not royalty or academy but Ponyville's hair-hidden inheritor of beastly tongues and arts and the small clan that would claim her, scattered at the wild edges of civilization, near and far. Twilight Sparkle reads on now, to extinguish the fires of the night soon, greet the dawn, and meet Spike over first and last respective meals of respective days, before retiring to feather comfort and heavy filtered mid morning light.  
In the orange of late afternoon magic selects an unmarked spine from a pile, one black and covered in stars, and a purple muzzle smiles at the irony as she makes a record of her most recent oneiromanic adventure ad astra in her diary of dreams and magic, and recalls to send it to Celestia tomorrow for her weekly check of progress. She rises and once more through her North facing window greets the sun for noon, the difference of a few hours little, she knew, how many times had she missed dawn, after all? She straightens herself up for the day, then empties her mind with consentration to feel and feel alone. Blankness, nothing, not, clear, calm... she moves slowly, not her body, but her herself, through the physical contortions of trotga, potent meditation. Her breathing controlled but constant, not unlike a newborn, or its mother in birth. She tingles and warms, her vision swims, colors come and go, surfaces ripple bounce or wave, until she must sit and let it pass through her as she puts herself into the peak. More she records. Clopping down the stairs, Twilight, happy and light, per usual after communion, is reminded by riotous laughter that today is the day. She smiles along, as she often must stop when reminded of Spike's Thursday engagements. As little as there is for any combination of boy, two year old, and dragon to do in Equestria, let alone Ponyville, and as Twilight thinks, snickers, one hardly expects 'bridge with the girls', all mares atleast 15 times lover boy's age, to be the highlight of his week as planned. She rounds a corner into the kitchen and takes a look around the earth pony card table (very small, round, with holes in the top for high easels on pegs to hold the cards themselves) to the typical partners, North and South Spike and the mayor, East and West an old hand in cloud control and the local pharmacist, Sunny Fog and Pestle. As always, being the beginning of the second half the evening, Spike and mayor were steadily taking more wins, oddly for his part, if you'd never seen it before, in reality the draw to this particular club is it's apparent unspoken rule to drink as much as they played. "Ey, Twilight, been taken sleeping lessions from Rambow Dash?", teases Sunny. "She's been cooking down a bunch of romancey smalt for a date with Luna tonight.", Spike says to his left, "I'm not supposed to expect her back till morning." Twilight rolled her eyes. He's said that three times now.  
The windows more than likely bow out on Thursdays. If the mares laughed any harder at Spike's jokes Twilight could sware the most common rumor about the old friends' procivities may be true. That is, if other rumors weren't more appealing. "Bo'h Princesses Twilight? Sleeping lessions indeed!", the mayor interjects.  
What was the glazier's name again? Shiney Sands? After that outburst of laughter Spike revives again with an 'I don't get it', and Twilight excuses herself to collect the final elements to the evening and gladly leave them to do whatever it is three older mares and a baby dragon do once their too drunk to play anything wholesome. It's not as if she need worry, she knew that the neighbors can hear Spike scream should he need to.

At dusk, Twilight returns, and at dusk, Twilight departs, perscibed gifts and luxuries in her saddlebags. Her return the following morning would be hailed by the beat of pegesi at the library door, to deliver the unconcious foal to her bed. On waking, but after a brief moment, she screamed. She had hoped, but for that brief moment of doubt, her recollections were nightmares, but even in the light of morning did her visions persist. Spike the two remaining ponies of last night's game, too drunk to leave on Spike's good concience, Pestle and Sunny, rushed to her. "Twilight, what's wrong?"  
"Everything Spike! The whole world's wrong!" The pony was now balled up in a confusion of sheets, her tremors evident to everyone in the room.  
"We thought we saved Luna, but we were wrong, Spike, dead wrong! Nightmare Moon lives!"  
"She's not making any sense. She must be in shock. Twilight, Luna's been fine for months now, she's gone back to protecting us!"  
The pegusis to her right made a skeptical noise, not even offering a word, the group knew her oppinion on the matter.  
"Politics is all a masquerade," the unicorn said with the same urgency, looking at them all with vacant, evasive eyes.  
The doctor remained cordial. "Few people these days believe Luna is a threat," she said, thinking privately: Nine out of ten schizophrenics have an obsession with evil, and eight out of ten will produce some variation on that masquerade metaphor.  
"Few people these days," Twilight responds shaking, "can see beyond the end of their own nose."  
"You have reason to know better, eh?" prodded the doctor.  
"Are you an therapist too?" she asked abruptly.  
There it is again, the pharmacist thought: the astonishing intuition, or extrasensory perception, these types so often exhibit. "No," he said carefully, "but I do treat mental and nervous disorders - but not from the position of the traditional therapist."  
"I do not need a therapist," she said bitterly, ignoring the doctor's refusal to accept that label.  
"Who said that you did?" asked the doctor, "I am merely curious what would convice you that. I was a bit hard won over myself."  
A skeptical sound comes from the pegasus.  
"Excuse me" Twilight says with faultering control as she leaves her bed for the bathroom "Has she ever been like this before?"  
"No, she's usually so calm, I can't believe that she's just, snapped or something!" "Quieter, Spike. Did she tell you what she was going to be doing with Luna last night?"  
"No, she-"  
Twilight stands on the presipese to her room, eyes heavily lided.  
"Talking about me behind my back? Get out, I'm going back to bed."  
No protest is made as the trio exits around her, standing in the door they watch Twilight drops against the mattress, sleeping suddenly.  
"She must have taken something," pestle speculates.  
Later, Spike, alone again after the mares had left after some time waiting, returns to Twilight's side. He hears some sound, and as he proceeds up the stairs, they grow louder "No. . . no. . . I won't go into the garden. . . not again. . . Oh, Celestia, that thing. . . the bat wings flapping. . . the enormous red eye. . .Celestia help me!"  
The dragon looks on in pity and revulsion, yet hessitates to wake her.  
"The Invisible College," Twilight mumbled in a silly schizophrenic singsong. "Now you see it, now you don't. . . into air, into thin air. . . Even Celestia wasn't real"  
He had heard enough. "You were having a bad dream," he said as he shook her awake "Just a bad dream. . ."  
"But it was it Spike, even now they're after me."  
"Twilight," Spike said urgently, "whatever you fear is inside your own mind. It is not outside you at all. Please try to understand that."  
"You fool," she says, no shake left in her voice "inside and outside are the same to them. They can enter our minds whenever they will. And they can change the world whenever they will."  
"They?" the baby dragon asked shrewdly. "The Invisible College?"  
"The Invisible College is dead. The Black Brotherhood has taken over the world." 


	2. Meeting of minds

It was her last year in school that Twilight's single remaining relation died. Her uncle had been long suffering in his illness, but just as anyone he succame. At that school, any would recall her a slim nervous foal, the butt of student jokes and always described as "shy," "bookish" or "peculiar" by her classmates. She herself felt less than totally miserable only when walking alone through the most heavily wooded sections of her uncle's 20,000 acres, thinking "green thoughts in a green shade," as the great poet said; there it sometimes seemed to her, especially when dusk was casting cinnamon and gold highlights into the emerald-green branches, that a door to another world would almost swing open and he could faintly discern the quick timid movements of dryads and the sulphurous sandal-wood scent, beneath the earth, of vast caverns of trolls. It was at such magic moments that a veil almost seemed to lift, a dim castle to arise in the mist, a trumpet to call to her of realms of romance and glamour, of danger and triumph. Those acres were all hers then, and the sum inherited would support her for the rest of her life, Goddess willing. As it turned out, more than willing.  
Twilight was also aware that the gods, or the blind impersonal forces of scientific theory, had, just as impassively as they murdered her mother and father and uncle, gifted her with an economic security generally considered a great blessing in a world where three-quarters of the population struggled desperately to get enough to eat day to day, and most laborers died, toothless and raggedy, before the age of forty, worn out by toil in those damned fields. Yet everybody knew that those fields were necessary to live and that the lot of most mares and colts had been even worse before electricity. She was confused about all this, and even more confused about the universe's intent toward her, if it owned any. The news was full of talk of assassinations, and the sinister supposed conspiracies that would cause them.  
Twilight graduated with honors five years later, the world yet still beset with conspiring forces killing royalty in far away lands. However, to her this is little consern, these voices but background noise. Her mind and heart were not in the world, but in the two scholarly realms known as history and mythology. Twilight refused to accept that distinction, having fallen totally in love with another world so long dead it was powerless to hurt her, unlike the present world, and yet was also rich in mystery and glamour.  
Twilight had majored in history and, derived from her master thesis, she had written her first book, she recieved small fanfare where anypony noticed. Widely however, this was not the case. The study was in fact an occult history, proposed to link the ancients with the magical orders of the middle ages. Few in academia would sully themselves with her semimystical approch to equinology, in fact, the only scholarly commentary on her work derided her romantism in hinting that there may be some serviving link between then and the middle ages, and even more proposterously, then and now. Dejected, her career as a writer may have ended there. Twilight was contacted sometime after publication. More correctly she was summoned to the castle of Equestria, where she was recieved, alone, by Princess Celestia, who congratulated Twilight on her studies, much to her suprise. "Your theories aren't all that far from the truth", she said, "Though there are no records surviving that would tell the tale, there has been a legacy of secret teachings through out history. While many modern lodges and orders, as you no doubt may see, exist only in watery forms, there still exists those that know truly the secrets of the ages, even here in Equestria, especially Canterlot."  
Twilight proceeds carefully, while much of her nerviousness had left her after some small talk, this sudden deepening revived most of it. "How much do you know, exactly?"  
Her response was to ask Twilight to dine with her tonight, so that all her concerns may be addressed. Twilight's half restrained yes introduced her the throne room's echo. Knowing her future pupil much better then she knew herself, Celestia allowed her to retire for a time to her personal library till dinner came. Twilight sifted through her knowledge of Hermetic and Rosicrucian pamphlets from long ago, and puzzling once again upon the enigmatic writings of those she suspected of being part of the underground tradition of Cabalistic magic. The Alchemical Marriage, with its strange medley of Equestrian and foregin allegorical figures, the Enochian fragments which Dr. Dee had received from an allegedly superhuman being near the begining of Celestia's rule, the sly and cryptic Triumphant Beast, the writings of dozens more. Again and again she encountered overt or coded references to that damnably mysterious Invisible College, composed of Illuminated mares and colts - Secret Chiefs - which allegedly governs all the world behind the scenes; and again and again she asked herself if she dared to believe it. It was with this great strain on her mind then that she drifted to sleep waiting, and in the strain she dreamed.  
In each dream, Celestia was dressed as a medieval wizard, with pointed hat and robes bearing the Order's sign with strange astrological glyphs, and she always led Twilight up a dark hill toward a crumbling Gothic building of indeterminate character midway between abbey and castle. This eldritch edifice was, of course (as she knew even in the dreams), a blend of various illustrations she had seen depicting Chapel Perilous of the Grail legend. Inside, according to occult lore, was everything she feared; and yet only by passing this test could she achieve the Rosicrucian goals - the Philosopher's Stone, the Elixer of Life, the Medicine of Metals, True Wisdom and Perfect Happiness. In each case, she never entered as the door of the Chapel that was opened for her and it all fades into another dream as she heard within a humming as of a myriad of monstrous bees.  
Another dream, this of Dr. Dee himself, court astrologer to the young Luna and Celestia, greatest mathematician of his time, constant associate of spirits and angels according to his own claims; and Dee was offering her "the solace berry," a magical fruit that conferred immortality. "Take ye and eat from the tree Swifty ate," Dee said, but the fruit smelled of excrement and was foul to the sight and touch and when Twilight tried to refuse it, a second figure, female and shockingly livacious in figure and manner but with a cow's head, appeared beside Dee, saying solemnly, "Ignatz never really injures," as they were all suddenly standing again at the door of a vast insectoid Chapel Perilous. Fade.  
All the legends warned her that only the brave and the pure of heart may survive the journey through Chapel Perilous; and this was hardly encouraging, since like most introspective young mares Twilight had much insight into her own fears but woefully little realization of the fears of others, thereby wrongly suspecting herself of being atypically timid and cowardly; while in the purity-of-heart department she knew that she distinctly left a great deal to be desired: there were fantasies that were decidedly unchaste, although she nearly always managed to stop such imaginings before the worst and most nameless details were actually visualized in all their lewd and sinful seductiveness. Even when she was caught up in the bestial tug of these animalistic desires, and the details of certain unmentionable items formed with total and compulsive clarity in her mind, she did not allow herself to linger voluptuously on the fantasy of actually fondling or intimately manipulating those particular items, desirable and monstrous and unspeakable as they were. If it could in truth be said that she did lapse on occasion, certainly she resisted successfully nearly all of the time such fantasies arose, and yet the guilt of those few, rare, hardly typical lapses did weigh heavily upon her conscience and seemed now to be a distinct bar against such a bicameral creature as herself entering the precincts of Chapel Perilous.  
She was roused some time later by one of the palace's many servants, and lead to an intimate dinning room. Here, in the haze of waking, did she relax and begin to observe.  
Celestia was beatiful, amiable and proved to have impeccable taste in wines. She was also reassuringly normal, wore no wizard's hat and spoke of her 'children' with great fondness; better still, she was an incredibly worldly soul, not at all the misty-eyed believer type who might be leading Twilight the garden path into Cloud-Cuckoo Land. You couldn't help liking and trusting her.  
Dispite the difference in age, she seemed free of condescension toward Twilight's youth. A plain blunt mare with a bedrock of sound sense and decency, she admired as she heard of the princess' affairs - and yet it did take her a long time to open up even a little about the Invisible College.  
"You must understand, Twilight, that these affairs are circled about with ferocious Oaths of Secrecy and dreadful pledges of silence," she confided eventually. "All of that appears quite pointless in this free and enlightened age - pardon my irony - but it is part of the tradition, dating back to the most superstisious days, when it was, of course, even more necessary."  
Twilight, with the bluntness of youth, decided to answer this with a somewhat probing question. "Am I to take it, madame, that you are yourself bound by such an Oath?"  
"Goddesses and Aunt Agnes," Celestia moaned, more amused than offended, "one simply doesn't ask that on a first meeting. Consider the patience of the fisherman rather than the rapacity of the journalist if you would open the door to the Arcanum of Arcana. And for my own vainity, Celestia or Celest will be just fine."  
She then proceeded to attack her salad with unabashed vigor, as if that equivocation were not tantamount to an admission. Twilight understood: she was being tested; her exact status on the evolutionary ladder was being estimated.  
"Have you read my book on Cabala?" she asked next, trying a more circuitous approach.  
"Oh, I've read your book," she said. "Wouldn't have missed it for the world. There is nothing more poignant and gallant, on this planet, than a young mare writing passionately about Cabala without any real experience of its mysteries."  
Twilight felt the needleprick in those words, but answered merely, "At that point, I was not concerned with personal experience, but merely with setting right the historical record."  
"But now," Celestia asked, not even raising her eyes"you are interested in personal experience?"  
"Perhaps," She said carelessly, feeling brave. "Mostly, I am concerned with proving my thesis that such groups have survived over the centuries - proving it so thoroughly that even those-those, daft mules will have to admit I'm right!"  
Celestia nodded. "Wishing to prove oneself right is the usual motive for scholarship," she said mildly. "But this group I mentioned has no interest in setting the historical record straight, or in advertising themselves. Do y'see, Twilight, that they really don't care what the world at large thinks, or what the pompous asses in the universities think, either? They have entirely different interests."  
With a sense of reverence at the truth, cation returns to her. She proceeds.  
"In your letter," she said, "you spoke of this group very carefully in the past tense. I believe your exact words were, 'There has even been a lodge of true adepts continuing the hidden heritage right here in Equestria, in this decade.' How many years, exactly, has it been since the lodge existed?"  
"It broke apart exactly ten years ago, in 1900."  
"And what was it called?"  
"The Hermetic Order of the Gilded Rise."  
Twilight exhaled deeply and took another sip of wine. "You are becoming less indirect in your answers," she said happily. "I take that as a good sign. Let me advance to the main point in one step, then. Is it possible that the Order did not entirely break apart a decade ago?"  
"Many things are possible," she response, signaling for more wine. "Before we go any further, let me show you a simple document which every member of this Order must sign, and swear to, with the most horrible Oaths. Just glance it over for a minute, Twilight." And she passed from under the table a simple sheet of ordinary letterpaper, neatly written in flowing hand writting.  
'Supreme...Knowledge and Conversation...Secret Knowledge to transcend...one with the Highest Intelligence...never use...slit...burned...cut...thrown into the sea...hated by pony and all else. I swear.'  
"Were I presented this in another context, I'd sign without a second thought." shesaid boldly, surrendering her spiritual virginity long before she would have the courage to surrender the virginity of her body.  
"That is most interesting," Celestia said affably, retrieving the paper and removing it back under the table. "I will speak to certain people. You may hear from us in a fortnight or so."  
And the rest of the evening, which was brief, they spoke only of her beloved 'children' and her equally beloved occupation as ruler. There was nothing in the slightest occult or extraordinary about her at all. To some extent, she was even dull; and yet Twilight left her feeling vaguely as if she had been talking to one of the moon-ponies.  
Another dream awaited her when she got back home.

... a scarlet-walled castle owned by a man-eating ogre named Sir Talis. "You must enter without being sown," said Judge Everyman, "for bleating runes are red."  
King Neighdward III, wearing the conventional trappings of the Equestrian royalty, wandered in numinous room incandescent muttering something about the impotence of being honest.  
"The moover hoovered," He He Commons added helpfully. "The door opens to the wastebule, past eggnaughts to oldfresser Poop in the Watercan."  
"The unbeatable and the unsbrickable," shrieked a giant owl.  
"Sol is buried inside," muttered Uncle Bentley. "Talk id and hoot!"  
Twilight realized he was in the Temple of Solomon the King as described in Freemasonic literature.  
"Wee-knee got Thor, Twil Lit war bore," roared a Lion.  
"Passing as some dew-mist too dense upon the air," whizzed an Eagle.  
"Bloog ardor!" howled Sir Knott the Almighty. "Take heed and hate!" Twilight, a solo mare under sectualism, stumbled into the owld cavern of skeletons, a tripentoctocon where the morn's dozen sheens. A sign said:  
DO NOT MEDDLE IN THE AFFAIRS OF WIZARDS:  
IT MAKES THEM SOGGY AND HARD TO LIGHT "Said, the old servant of Envy," the Angel was lecturing, "tore him to shredded wheat and planeted him where the somn dozing snore, but he gnaw not weth the dew. For they whisked in a flicker, Jenny Peg and Brother Rot and Hamster, prinzipdungmark, and, slack it, a mouse with seven gerbils."  
"These," Celestia said with a gesture at the bones, "are those who came on this path without the Pentacle of Valor. What do you drink, Tie Knight: Shall damn bones leave?"  
But before Tied Fight could decide on the literalness of the question, they were in the dark back shelves of the Tyrone side wing of the Brutus Museum in the gaseous shade of the tree Swifty ate, the tree ovus gaggin scissors, and Karl Mare was reading aloud from what appeared to be the secret history of Freemasonry: "And Solomon was a motley kink, and he shut in his cuntinghorse on the tail of his broken spine just accounting for his honey; and the LORD spook into him and said: Solomon, git. And Silvamoon gat; and in the foulness of tomb Solomon gart bark and begat. And Sol O'Morn begat Nightrex and Nighttricks begat Mars Harem and Moose Hiram began Finnegan and Faolycohen begot Heromare and Hairy Moon bigot Sir Talis and Surd Alice begott begad Roy O'Range Yellagroin and Roy O'Range Yallagroin begat the little Blowindianviolated Engine That Could." He lapsed into nearly Russian idioms.  
"Is that not a rather large thing to expect us to begin upon?" Twilight asked, hearing herself talking, waking to the morning sun.  
Sitting up, she found she was still half-dreaming or talking to herself internally. "We are such stuff as dreams are made of," her or somebody's voice was saying. the poet, of course: The Tempest. A great line, often quoted, but what did it mean when you stopped to think about it? What did The Tempest mean, for that matter? If Prospero is he himself, as all the scholars claim, why is Prospero a magician rather than a poet? Why does he associate with faeries, elves, the monster Caliban and all the assembly of the occult?  
And "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower came." What is that line doing in Lear, where it has nothing to do with the plot at all? Was he part of the Invisible College?  
Twilight ate a larger breakfast than usual and took a long walk afterward, reaffirming the solidity of matter and the reality of earth, sky and trees. She did not dread being known as a Romantic, but she had no intent of becoming a damned fool. 


	3. Everyone you meet

Twilight spent the next two weeks re-reading and meditating on the classic Rosicrucian pamphlets of the seventeenth century. Everything Celest had so prosaically illustrated was there: the Brother of the Invisible College of the Rosy Cross will "dress in the garb" of the country where he resides and "adapt all its customs"; although forever pledged to the Invisible College, she will manifest no overt sign to the world, except that he might heal the sick, taking no money for that service.

At the exact termination of the fortnight, Sir John received a small package in the mail from P. O. Box 718, Main Post Office, London. Inside was a small pamphlet entitled "History Lection." Authorship was given as:  
Hermetic Order of the G.'.R.'.  
Her heart leaped; she knew that those pyramidal dots represented, in occult symbology, an order possessing the original Mason Word, admittedly lost to all other orders. He recalled from the anonymous Manes Threlopey:  
For we be brethren of the Rosy Cross We have the Mason Word and second sight Things for to come we can see aright

With trembling fingers, Twilight opened the pamphlet and began to read the secret history of the Hermetic Order of the Gilded Rise. In 1875, it said, a great fire destroyed Freemasons' Hall in Canterlot. Robert Weanling - a writer whose books on Masonry were familiar to Twilight - found some long-forgotten documents, while rescuing important charters and other items of value from the flames. These mysterious papers were in a cipher unknown to him or any other Canterlot Freemasons of the time. By dint of continuous, meticulous effort and perseverance, Robert eventually solved the cipher, decoded the documents, then found himself in possession of the secrets of the Invisible College - secrets which orthodox Freemasonry had long since lost. The documents also provided a link with a continental order which seemed to possess even deeper secrets and provided the address of a high initiate named Fraulein Anna Spurngel in Ingolsturrip, Buckvaria.  
The lection went on to tell how Robert Weanling Little and various other London Freemasons, guided by Fraulein Spurngel, began the Hermetic Order of the Gilded Rise, originally admitting as members only those who were already high-degree Masons. Using the techniques learned from Miss Spurngel and the ciphered documents, they gradually recreated the whole working repertoire of Cabalistic occultism underlying the Rosy Cross order of Freemasonry and sought earnestly to establish astral contact with the Higher Intelligences on other planes who could gradually educate and guide them in the risky transition from the domesticated eohippus of historical ponydom to a higher stage on the evolutionary scale.  
This "History Lection" went on to assert that such contact had been established and that the Golden Dawn was now operating under astral guidance. It added ominously that students should beware of several impostors who had seized upon the name of the order and were operating false Gilded Rises of their own devoted to diabolism and black magick. Among these heretics, who seemed to number nearly a dozen - when the original Golden Dawn split into factions, it split violently, Twilight gathered - two names particularly struck Twilight because of their resonant roll: MacGregor Withers and Aleistire Coltly.

Twilight's mind reeled, at the edge of some great thing trying to strike the heart of it, like some giant maze, and with each new detail walls came down, yet still each detail grew the maze outward. She reflected on the "History Lection" for two days before deciding how much further she dared go. Then she wrote back to Celestia and begged admission to the Hermetic Order of the Gilded Rise as a Probationer.  
And so she crossed the thrice-sealed door and passed over from being a student of occult history to being a tentative and nervous practitioner of occult arts, wherein she was soon to learn that we are in fact such stuff as dreams are made of, and that Sir Talis is inescapable.  
Twilight was initiated on the night of July 23, 1910 - exactly 307 years to the day after the knighting of Sir Francis Bacolt, the alleged Grandmaster of the Invisible College in Equestria.

Three nights after the initiation, Twilight experienced it over again, in the form of another hermetic dream. She was being led, blindfolded, to the throne of the South where opens the window of the Silver Star in night's roaman indigo.  
"Who comes here?" asked the Gordean, Sir Francis Bacolt.  
"One who seeks the Light," she replied, according to the traditional Masonic formula explained to her before the ceremony.  
"Ponykind cannot bear very much Light," said Nightrix in a watery voice. "Look upon what little you domesticated mammals are presently prepared to receive."  
There was a spouter inn the weib and Twilight found herself back again at the Tower Struck By Lightning. Sir Talis, a gorged hairyman, was counting out his honi. Twi Knight crept past ovaseer Peep parsing as somndreamist and found hirselves in a vast humming hive (decliner flying, mythra ovid: what a mare dasn't shame) where mad ponies struggled frantically to kill each other, cursing and screaming, "You will, whisker, you will!" and clutching daggers gats dirks goaters and broken bottle shards, uttering vowelth, muttering foulth, as all sank into dank, dark blood-red fetid moonslime. "Kid goaters!" they howled. "And that the Vril is strong!" A medieval scroll was unrolled, Indie, Norse, Russian, Irish, veryvery long but veryvery dutiful, saying:  
DO NOT THROW BUTTS IN THE URINAL:  
FOR THEY ARE SUBTLE AND SWIFT TO ANGER Sed, the whole's arpent of entry, a muddy murky leaky Spark, pressed cowrin throngs upon her, shrieking, "Fear the forgotten!"  
"These," said Nud the Allmousey (Eutaenius Microstemmus) in eagulls clause, "are those who came this way without the Cup of Sympathy. Each imagines all the others to be terrifying demons and thinks he acts only in self-defense. Tragic, and ironic, is it not?"  
Twilight Sparkle awoke with a start.  
"Sweet Celestia!" she said, without any profane intent. Was that dream a vision of how humanity looked from the viewpoint of an Illuminated mind?  
"A real initiation never ends," Celestia had said cryptically, before the physical-plane initiation. She understood: the dream, in its own language, was indeed a continuation of the initiation, but on another plane. Even the masks used in the actual ceremony were now, in the light of the dream's clear message, an allegory, not a mere bit of theatrical mummery. The masks worn in ordinary life are psychological, not cardboard, but nonetheless serve to hide each from her fellows; Society is the Devil's Masquerade.  
When she met next with Celestia at the castle, the dreams of the Dark Tower were discussed at length and Twilight proudly exhibited her decoding of their symbolism, especially the allegory of the masks.  
"True enough," Celestia said. "But it is also a rule of our Order that nobody in it ever knows personally any more than one other member. The masks used in initiations help enforce that rule."  
"And what, pray, is the purpose of that?"  
"Mars is the patron god of all societies," she said grimly. "Competition is what destroyed us the last time. Every pony knew every pony, so we all fell into transcendental egotism - 'my Illumination is higher than your Illumination,' that sort of thing - and the Devil of Disputation drove us apart. We don't repeat any of our mistakes, Twilight. From here on, except for very special emergencies, perhaps, you will meet nobody else in the lodge but myself. If we don't know one another, we can't fall into rivalries."  
This radical decentralization was a double-edged device, Twilight soon realized. Not only was he spared the waste of time and energy that might have been spent wondering if he were progressing faster or slower than another student, but the mystery created by this lack of sociability had a subtle and new effect on all his perceptions of other ponies.  
At first, she would merely wonder, if somebody made a remark that seemed more insightful than usual, "Could it be. . . is they are one of us, too?" Was Shakespeare in the Invisible College? The head waiter at Claridge's? Just how many members were there? It was impossible to get a literal answer out of Celestia about this. "The question itself implies a Probationer's ignorance about the true nature of Space and Time," was all she would contribute on that subject. Twilight began to wonder, every time she read the familiar newspaper yarn about a person rescued from danger by a Mysterious Stranger who immediately vanished without accepting thanks or leaving their name. "Another of us?" She would speculate romantically, seeing the protective hand of the Great White Brotherhood everywhere. Of course, her time at the college wasn't wasted, she had imbibed, at least by osmosis, something of modern skeptical scholarship, and she knew all this might be mere infatuation with a wonderful myth.  
But, on the other hand, one could not expect to be provided with special goggles allowing the members of the Invisible College to see each other, could one?  
And the enigma of hermetic societies was more subtle than that, she was to discover. The Golden Dawn, after all, was allegedly continuing the unbroken tradition of the original Invisible College of the Rosy Cross, whose members "wore the garb and adapted the manners" of the country in which they resided. Twilight soon found that even the most inane remarks or offensive behavior would trigger the same question: "Another of us?" How many Adepts might there be, traveling about in the guise of ordinary ponydom, carefully hiding their advanced state behind a masquerade of socially normal stupidity or conformity? The Gilded Rise literature made it abundantly clear that a true Adept might play any role or suffer any humiliation in order to accomplish his or her special Work: The Fool may be The Magus in disguise.  
Twilight was simultaneously devouring tons of mystical literature from all nations and all ages, dumped on her ten volumes at a time by Celestia. Written examinations once a month determined that she understood, at least verbally, what she read.  
"But I am devoted to you," Sir John protested once.  
"Nor do we wish to make you any more or less than that," Celestia replied. "But to progress in the Great Work, you must become aware of the invisible truth behind the visible paraphernalia of all religions. In our Order, the Equestrian may remain Equestrian, or any faith as it may be, but whatever their faith, they may not remain narrow-minded sectarians."  
Twilight began to understand this ambiguous ecumenicism a bit while studying a text on Buddhism. The refrain, "Everyone you meet is a Buddha," began to drive her to despair; it was so nonsensical; it was repeated so often, in so many different ways; it was obvious that she would have to understand it before she began to comprehend what Buddhism was all about. She, therefore, at Celestia's suggestion, tried to see the Buddha in everyone she met - and then she understood quickly.  
The effect was the same as the deliberate mystification with the Gilded Rise about who was a memberwas or wasn't a member. Looking for the Buddha in everyone, like looking for more members of the Order, caused her to pay a great deal closer attention to people than she ever had before, and to see more of their mysterious and adamantine individuality, rather than classifying them into categories of age, sex, race, caste or other superficialities. She now saw all people as mysterious, incredible beings; and he understood, suddenly, a most annoying paradox of Goethe, who had said, "What is hardest of all? That which seems most simple: to see with your eyes what is before your eyes."  
She thought this was marvelous and poured it out in manic excitement at his next meeting with Jones.  
"Very good," Celest said condescendingly. "You have awakened, a little, from one of the dreams that keep the sleepwalkers on the street from seeing one another. This is a beginning, but only a beginning. Don't be too impressed with your progress, for God's sake, or you'll never move another inch. Try seeing the divine Light in every beautiful object that comes your way - deep scarlet rubies, or tiger-lilies in a field, or the red markings on a crab's back. Then ask yourself where consciousness and divinity are not."  
And with that crushing and yet encouraging speech, delivered with a trace of leonine fire, mild Celestia seemed to her definitely beyond all doubt the genuine article: a true Adept. Then, without mercy, Celestia dumped ten books on Cabala upon Twilight, told him to master them thoroughly - and nearly torpedoed and sank her forever.  
Twilight, previously, had studied Cabala only as a historian, learning enough of its terminology and theories to trace its influence from the early Hermeticists like Pico neigh Mirandola and Giordano Bruno through Dr. Dee and Sir Francis Bacolt, onward to Freemasonry and Illuminism. Now she found herself confronted with the necessity of mastering the entire Cabalistic theory of the universe, which was about a thousand times more complicated than the periodic table of chemical elements.  
According to Cabala, the cosmos is governed by symbolic correspondences between many planes of being, visible and invisible. That seemed simple enough; but the correspondences themselves had no logical connections at all - "Cabala transcends logic," Celestia reminded Twilight often. The correspondences could only be learned by brute force and rote repetition until they finally embedded themselves in the memory. Even after being memorized, the correspondences would not be understood by the student, Celestia cheerfully remarked; true understanding, she said, could come only through intuition or through direct experience of the invisible planes, by techniques to be taught when Twilight graduated from Probationer to Neophyte, the second degree. 


	4. Get ready to get out of your head

I Twilight Sparkle, swear that I, from this day forward will seek the Knowledge and Conversation of Mine Holy Guardian Angel, whereby I may acquire the Secret Knowledge to transcend mere ponydom and be one with the Highest Intelligence; and if I ever use this Sacred Knowledge for monetary gain in any manner, or to do harm to any living being, may I be accursed and damned; may my throat be cut, my eyes be burned out and my corpse thrown into the sea; may I be hated and despised by all intellectual beings, both pony and all else, throughout all eternity. I swear. I swear. I swear.

This is the pledge sworn by Twilight before beginning her training. It was nearly a year before she saw it again, disappearing into smoke and ash, a new, muh stronger oath before her.

Once, Twilight had the temerity to ask Celestia about the Mysterious Holy Guardian Angel which the Golden Dawn training was intended to evoke.  
"Usually," Celestia said, "that is explained three different ways - for Probationers, Neophytes, and those of higher rank who have yet not attained it. In your case, considering the mixture of scholarship and romanticism I detect in your temperament, I will give you all three explanations simultaneously. One: it is a metaphor that signifies, roughly, learning to receive communications from your own unconscious mind without the usual distortions. Two: it is not that simple at all; the Holy Guardian Angel speaks to you through your unconscious, but is literally a separate being of evolutionary status as far beyond us as we are beyond the first invertebrates. Three: yes, it is a metaphor, after all, but for something so far outside our ordinary consciousness that it doesn't matter a rap whether you think of it in the scientific terms of my first answer or in the mystical terms of my second answer; it transcends both. When you have the experience, you will find your own metaphor for it, which may result in a scientific theory never known to the world before, in a work of art, or just in a change in your life toward sanctity or compassion or something more traditionally 'religious.' Do more of the work and ask fewer questions, if you want to advance faster."

Eventually, nine months after Sir John's initiation, he had completed his reading course in world mysticism and was able to pass all of Celestia's Cabalistic quizzes easily. By now, she was also totally confused and was beginning to wonder if she or herself or both of them might not be a bit mad. After all, what did an ox have to do with a pony in Fool's garb, or either of them with the color yellow or spirit? If Thoth and Hermes were the same god under two names, well and good; that made sense historically. But why were they in correspondence with the Hebrew word for "house"? Or what the hell did the planet Venus have to do with the letter daleth and the goddess Demeter?

It came time then, for her final quiz. Her mind flew over the possible corilations in that damned abbrivation. Hand, fish, head, hand; hand, fish, head, hand; hand, fish, head, hand . . . Dozens of ideas came to him that were original and dazzling (she once began to see evolution as a pre-written scenario. . .), but nothing came up that didn't seem like empty and windy nonsense when she re-thought it later.  
She tried the astrological correspondences: Virgo, Scorpio, the Sun, Virgo. A virgin, an insect, the Sun, and the virgin again. That was even less helpful than hand-fish-head-hand. She tried Virgin-hand, insect-Death, head-Sun, Virgin-hand. This gave rise to a line of thought which made her quite embarrassed and caused her to doubt again if she had the purity of heart to pass through Chapel Perilous successfully.  
The Greek correspondences were resonant with eerie imagery. Chronos, god of Time, could be visualized gruesomely by recalling Goya's terrifying painting, Chronos Devouring His Children. Hades and the world of the dead were easy to invoke by remembering the descent of Odysseus to the underworld. Apollo reminded Sir John of Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas and was harder to deal with. But what was the meaning of the sequence itself: Chronos, Hades, Apollo, Chronos?  
She tried contemplating the images on the Tarot cards:  
The Hermit: an old man carrying a lantern in the dark. But what did that have to do with yod, the hand, except that you need a hand to carry a lantern? And why the correspondence with scorpions and virginity?  
Death: a skeleton on a great white horse, mowing down King, Bishop, Mother and Child in his path. But what did that have to do with nun, a fish? Although it fit Hades, God of the dead, of course.  
The Sun: a naked child on the same great white horse with the sun rising in the background. And what did that have to do with resh, the head? Although it fit the astrological correspondence for once.  
And the old Hermit carrying his lantern again . . .  
Was it a psychological parable about the path of initiation itself? The student's mind begins as an old man (social tradition), wandering in the darkness of ignorance, guided only by the lantern of intuition; becomes transformed through the death of its conditioned aspects - the links with King (the State), Bishop (the Church), Mother and Child (family); is reborn as the sun-child ("Unless ye become as a little child ye shall in no wise enter the Kingdom"); and then - and then - why the return to the old man wandering in the dark? It was just more nonsense, when she thought she was on the right track at last.  
The next night she awoke from a dream of buzzing goblins in honey-suits with the sentence clear in his head: I Never Risk Inquiry. She was sure this was a most profound revelation and hastily scribbled it down in his bedside notepad. In the morning he read it again and could only laugh.  
But an hour later, in her library, a most peculiar accident occurred. He was reaching for her Hebrew dictionary again, when another book somehow got dislodged and fell at his feet. She bent to pick it up and found it was a seventeenth-century alchemical treatise, opened at page 270, the value of the letters added. The first paragraph began:  
The secret of the Great Work is given to all true Christians by the formula I.N.R.I., which, properly interpreted, means Igni Natura Renovatur Integra.  
The translation leaped into Twilight's mind in a blinding flash: All of nature is renewed by fire.

Igni Natura Renovatur Integra: all forms are temporary and illusory, mere constructs of the imagination. The old Hermit will be struck down by Death, but the form behind the form, the life-energy, will be reborn as a new Child, which will in turn age and become the old Hermit again. Chronos, the Lord of Time, leads each of us inevitably to Death and Hades, Lord of the Underworld; but we rise again as Apollo, rise again each morning. Christ Crucified is indeed a re-telling of these Greek death-and-resurrection myths, as rationalist historians keep telling us; but the rationalists do not understand that the myth recurs because it is profoundly symbolic of the great cosmic truth: consciousness, like matter and energy, is neither created nor destroyed. The cycles repeat and repeat and repeat endlessly, but the same recurs always, because the Platonic Archetypes remain, unchanging themselves, beyond Time.  
"There is no right answer," Celestia said. They were dining, this time, at Claridge's, and Celestia had brought along a very small pamphlet instead of the usual stack of fat old books. "Or, I might as well have said, there are many right answers. Someday, not in the near future, we shall have a very profound philosophical discussion about that, but for the present it shall suffice to say that your answer is right for you, at this stage of your training."  
"But," She said, feeling deflated, "I felt it, even before I understood it. The energy, flowing through me as it flows through all things. The continuous process of destruction and recreation - the world remade by the fire of the spirit. I felt it," she repeated, a bit lamely.  
The monarch sighed profoundly. "You have taken your first step," she said sadly, "but you don't even know yet in which direction to walk. Pray contain your self-congratulations and really apply yourself to the exercises in this little pamphlet. We have scheduled your initiation as a Neophyte for next month sometime, but if you do not perform these exercises rigorously, at least four times a day, until then, it will be a false initiation - a hollow shell, a mere play-acting. Do not delude yourself that you have arrived before you have even learned how to travel."  
Twilight glanced at the pamphlet, which was titled:

Astral Projection Class-B Publication Hermetic Order of the G.'.R 


	5. The scarlet woman

Twilight's mood sank, gazing at the folded bit of paper. "So I am to practice getting out of my body now," she said uneasily.  
Twilight drank some claret neatly. "Just so," she replied calmly. "And most of the time you feel like a perfect damned fool. And you will suspect, once again, that we are a band of plausible madmen leading you to some metaphysical Bedlam. But do the exercises, record the results after each experiment, continue to show me your Magick Diary monthly for criticism and advice - and have patience, my student; patience! There is one further matter I must mention at this time. It will be necessary, I am afraid, for you to take an Oath of celibacy for the duration of the next two years. Will you accept that condition, or will you drop out of the Great Work, instead? Once taken, you understand, the oath is binding and will bring down terrible punishments if violated in any manner."  
She controlled her features with difficulty. "I remain pledged to the Great Work," she said firmly. "I will endure any trials that are necessasry."  
"I must ask you three times. Are you quite sure of yourself in this matter?"  
"I am." Twilight did not hesitate this time.  
"And I ask you the third time. Will you be bound by this Oath of celibacy for two full years and not attempt any mental reservations or sophistries to evade or circumvent it if it becomes onerous?"  
"I will be bound," Twilight said firmly.  
Celestia looked at her empty plate with seemingly great interest, as if searching for archaeological clues as to its age. "Celibacy, to be spiritually effective," she said mildly, quietly, "must be total. No. . . um. . . solitary vices may be allowed to console one for the absence of ponykind."  
Twilight felt the separate tension in each muscle of hwe face, thinking first: The blood is rushing to my cheeks and I'm blushing like an imbecile schoolchild. And then: No, the blood is draining from my face and I look like the pale criminal in the dock, not daring to look up at that moment lest she should also have looked up from her own seemingly obsessive scrutiny of her empty plate, and half-afraid also that Celestia might be so advanced an Adept that reading minds was as easy for her as reading the label on a champagne bottle; yet hyper-conscious again, as in the first rising of the alchemical heat, the first sense of the Rosy Crucifixion implied in the cryptogram I.N.R.I., aware of her own awareness and afraid of her own fear: once again confronting the foreboding of insanity that had plagued her since the first timid sins of puberty, so that in a kind of hysterical paralysis she felt time itself might have slowed and, wondering if paranoia was descending upon her, thinking I heard it, and, No, I only imagined it - for it seemed that somebody at a nearby table had said distinctly, almost mockingly, the name of that which was most intimately connected with her most shameful secret. But maybe the voice had only been mentioning Carter's, another restaurant.  
"I - I -" Twilight found she could not speak.  
Celestia drank another sip of wine. "Two years," she said calmly, as if not noticing her nervousness, "is not so terribly long a time, you will find. And you will discover that matters astral become increasingly easy as you place matters carnal away from you. I have confidence in you, Twilight Sparkle," he ended with abrupt warmth, patting the younger mare's back for emphasis.

Twilight returned home, to practice astral projection, feeling most of the time (as Celestia had warned her) like a perfect damned fool.  
If the I.N.R.I. riddle concerned the transcendence of time, the practice of astral projection seemed to aim at the abolition of space. The trick, she soon perceived, was to be in two places at once. Since that was manifestly impossible in reason, the only way to achieve it was to go beyond reason, to deliberately cultivate a type of faith bordering on religious mania. Her initial attempts were grotesque failures.  
Even after three weeks of practice four times a day, the best Twilight achieved was a transportation to the innards of some incredibly complex machine with a million or more moving parts, each tended by a blue puppet and a red dwarf moving jerkily, mechanical-style, all of them talking to themselves as they worked at their incomprehensible tasks. "Mulligan Milligan Hooligan Halligan," they muttered. "Magick tragick music mystic!" they shrieked. "Simple Simon Semper Semen," they giggled. "Barter carter darter farter!" they howled. "Sir Lion, Sir Loin, Sir Talis, Sir Qualis," they gibbered. With a shudder Twilight came back into her body into her chair into her room into Euclidean space, realizing that she had dozed off when she thought he was beginning to project into the astral.  
"Do not let such nonsense bother you," Celestia said when Twilight showed him the Diary entry of this experience. "One can hear the same gibberish at any Revival meeting or Spiritualist seance. You have just opened a door into another of the traps in Chapel Perilous. That is the realm of those who enter the Path without the Sword of Reason. If you reflect back, you will remember hearing the same idiocy just before falling asleep many nights."  
"Does everypony?"  
"Certainly. The mind has both a rational and an irrational side," Celestia said kindly. "To remain totally rational is to become half a pony. To allow the irrational to overwhelm you is to succumb to religious mania or the disease called hysteria by alienists. The Great Work consists of yoking the rational and irrational together in a harmony that transcends both. Until that is achieved, you may expect more nonsense to float up from the irrational regions. Ignore it, do not fear it, and concentrate on the Work."  
In the following weeks Twilight found the astral realm and the dreamworld increasingly blending into each other, and increasingly hard to disentangle from waking reality. She heard many messages like: "Sic simper tyranis shouted sir Talis, insert the shunt, the bat's just to bunt, but now we've got you by the cunt," "The void, the zero, the nought, the Almighty," "No wife, no horse, no mustache," "A weary weary song and a blurry blurry bottleful," "For blood and wine are red," "Yoni to those pensive ponies," and, several times, "Twilight's going crazy, Twilight's going crazy,Twilight's going crazy. . ."  
For relaxation, Twilight took to browsing in contemporary poetry, mindful of the GIlded Rise teaching that during training any extraneous reading should be limited to matter of a spiritually uplifting nature. She began to study the mystical Irish poet, William Buckler Yeats.  
The question "Another of us?" came back to her again and again, as she read poem after poem, and this time she had confidence enough to answer it with a definite "yes." There was no mistaking it; the poetry of Yeats was replete with oblique references to the GIlded Rise teachings and initiatory ceremonies.  
And then, by the wildest of coincidences - she was less and less inclined to believe in coincidences by now - she was invited to a small private reading at which Yeats and a few other poets were going to declaim some of the more recent works. Twilight accepted, feeling vaguely guilty; but then, she reminded herself, she was only forbidden to associate with other known members of the Order, and she did not, literally, know Yeats was a member, after all, since that was only a deduction, almost a guess, on her part.  
A small devilish voice told her, "It's not a guess; you do know." But she put that aside. The chance to meet another member of the Order - a famous one, and one who, judging from the poetry, had been in the Order for at least a decade and was hence presumably quite advanced - was really irresistible. Twilight went to the reading, even though it was in the godforsaken suburb of Kensington, which was said to be even more infested with Hindus, Hebrews, Americans and other undesirables than Soho itself.  
Indeed, the host turned out to be an American, of the most unbearable sort. His accent was nearly indecipherable - Twilight remembered the degenerate Oscar Wilde's really choice aphorism: "The English and the Americans have everything in common but their language." This unusual host was, like all Americans, bombastically sure of himself on all matters, especially (in his case) literature and the arts in general. His family name was Pound and his first name was one of those Hebraic titles that many Yankees seemed to favor - Ezekiel or Ezra or Jeremiah or something equally Old Testament. He had an untidy red mane, a wild red beard, stood well over the heads of any pony present, and boomed when he talked, like all Americans. No article of clothing he wore seemed to match any other article of his apparel; whether this was due to poverty, eccentricity or both, Twilight could not quite decide.  
Even the handsome Yeats himself was, if not unkempt, far from ideal in sartorial splendor, she also noted; but Yeats was serene where Pound was frantic, tolerant where Pound was dogmatic and gentle where Pound was rough.  
The readings were exceedingly miscellaneous. Pound read some amazingly short and unrhymed poems unlike anything Twilight had ever heard and then a very strange translation of "The Seafarer," in which he had somehow managed, in modern English, to include as many alliterative consonants and guttural assonances as the Anglo-Saxon original. A shy young mare named Hilda-something read some equally short pieces which sounded like very literal translations from the ancient Greek. Then, at last, Yeats began chanting and keening in his distinctive way, and Twilight finally heard something that sounded like real poetry to her. Shee almost wept with emotion at the lines:  
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone;  
It's with O'Leary in his grave Afterward, the bombastic Pound served some of the strongest coffee she had ever tasted, and led everybody into a lively discussion about what they had heard. English poetry, Pound said violently, was "trapped in the Miltonic trance," which he sarcastically caricatured as "whakty-whakty-whakty-whakty-boom! boom! whakty-whakty-whakty-boom! boom!" Experiments such as Hilda's imitations of the ancient Greeks, Yeats' recreation of Bardic forms of old Ireland and his own adaptions from the Chinese were necessary to enlarge the scope and range of verse, said this upstart. Several people immediately began protesting, and it seemed that Miltonic sonority and iambic pentameter were to them as important as the Monarchy to a Conservative.  
"It appears to me," said a mare named Lola, whose accent seemed Australian, "that poetry is invocation. If it does not invoke, then no matter what style it employs, it is not poetry."  
"Invocation," Pound cried, "belongs in churches. Poetry should present a precise image, in the fewest possible words, so that reading it is like being hit by an April breeze. That's what leaves an impression in the mind. Invocation and repetition are all blather that detracts from the red-hot intensity of the poetic flash itself, which only lasts a moment."  
"Oh, come, Ezra," Yeats protested mildly. "Repetitious rhythm is the essence of the act of love, which poetry is always, consciously or unconsciously, trying to simulate."  
Before Pound could reply, the young lady named Lola brazenly replied, without a blush, "Exactly the point, Mr. Yeats. Do you know what I consider the greatest modern poem? Captain Fuller's 'Treasure House.' Do you know it?" And she quoted:  
O thou brave soldier of life sinking into the quicksand of death! I adore thee, Evoe! I adore thee, IAO!  
O thou laughter resounding from the tombs! I adore thee, Evoe! I adore thee, IAO!  
O thou goat-dancer of the hills! I adore thee, Evoe! I adore thee, IAO!  
O thou red cobra of desire that art unhooded by the hands of maidens! I adore thee, Evoe! I adore thee, IAO!  
Twilight started violently and almost dropped his coffee cup. Once again the question "Another of us?" had an immediately affirmative answer. Evoe and IAO, according to GIlded Rise teachings, were two of the most secret Gnostic names to invoke divinity. She looked at Lola with astonishment, both because of these esoteric names she had quoted so casually and because nice young ladies simply did not speak so openly of the rhythm of the act of love. But she was looking at Yeats, awaiting a response, and her face was simply open and innocent; Twilight could not quite catch her eye.  
"Captain Fuller certainly has his great moments," Yeats said, with equal innocence, as if he were not aware that two of the most secret words of Power in occultism were being casually quoted in public. "However, while a few stanzas of that are fine, the whole poem does grow a bit wearisome after three hundred stanzas. There I must agree with Ezra that brevity would have been better."  
"Who - who is this Captain Fuller?" Twilight asked, trying also to sound casual.  
"A great authority on military strategy, I'm told," Pound said. "Lately, he has taken to writing quite a bit of mystical verse of that sort, all of it too damned long-winded and rhetorical for my taste."  
But Twilight was remembering, hwe pulses racing: "O thou red cobra of desire that art unhooded by the hands of maidens! I adore thee, Evoe! I adore thee, IAO!" The phallic double meaning was too overt to ignore, especially in the context of Yeats' remark about the rhythm of poetry being the rhythm of Eros. Was Lola, then, involved with one of the forbidden, lefthand lodges ("Cults of the Shadow," Celestia called them) that had split from the Gilded Rise and gone off in the direction of diabolism? She looked at Lola again and this time she did catch her eye, but what she read there was a most enigmatic humor. Was it friendly, mocking or dangerously malign? Or was her imagination merely fevered by the fact that she was under a two-year Oath of celibacy and yet knew, for the first time, a sensual yearning strong enough to conquer both her timidity and the stern Victorian ethics instilled in her by her family? Was this attraction strong enough, she thought in fear, to conquer her Oath? She turned her eyes to the other side of the room, feeling a rush of blood to the face, and found herself suddenly engulfed in suspicious thoughts. Yeats, obviously, was a member of the GIlded Rise. How many others at this poetry reading were, also? Could this whole evening be a test of her Oath? She could not bring herself to look in Lola's direction again, and she left the party as soon as politeness allowed.  
But that night she dreamed of Lola raising her skirt to fix her garter and she caught her looking, cawing thanes, ands he was scared wild (prosing zombie-dish) pursued by a faster boog, Sid, theol bardot of sneakery. There were hatenotes and featherfurgolems and potions burning boiledest; Til Knight, intrepid, nerveless, rapacious, idiotic, stumbled past the beehive pearlous. And the sun begin to rus, and oh up he ris, and he was all rose up, loinharted, up there so eye and moisty, spar cunt of the morn, between them two toughies, for the romanz did tromp her, garther forgiven, the achtnotes hurling bricks. "Hate and be gored," sagd Shut and she saw, he was, he saw, she was, the Hideous God, Baphomet, hir dugs hanging limp, hir bigcock standing stern, under the inverse pentacle of the Tempters.  
Twilight screamed as he sat up in bed with a thunderous crash shaking the room.  
"Are you all right?" It was the voice of Wildeblood, the butler, outside the door.  
"Did you hear it, too?" she asked. "I thought it was a dream. . ."  
"It must have been an earth tremor, miss. Can I help you?"  
"No," Twilight said. "I'm quite all right, Wildeblood."  
Looking across the room, she could see that the mirror was smashed. The poltergeist effect: typical of the onset of astral invasions. She reminded herself of the primary GIlded Rise teachings: not to give way to fear whatever happened, and not to jump to conclusions. Wildeblood was probably right; it was only an earth tremor.  
But she could not sleep again until dawn; for she had seen the face of Baphomet, the Hideous God, and she knew that her journey into Chapel Perilous was no longer confined to dream alone. The earth had literally shaken beneath her; the astral and the physical were interacting. It was "probably only an earth tremor," but it was connected, psychically, with the real opening of the door between the visible and invisible worlds. She wouldn't be telling Celestia about this. 


	6. But I am no snake charmer

Twilight grimly continued her efforts at astral projection. Celestia, meanwhile, became more bizarre in her teaching methods. At one of their fortnightly meetings, she showed Twilight a cartoon, depicting a very disgruntled gentleman and a very officious customs inspector glaring at each other. The customs inspector was saying, "These cats is dogs and the rabbits is dogs, but that bloody turtle is a hinsect!"  
Twilight smiled uncertainly. "Amusing," she ventured tentatively.  
"It is the whole secret of Illumination," Celestia said solemnly, "if you consider it deeply enough."  
She insisted on giving the cartoon to Twilight, who obediently took it home, hung it in her bedroom and contemplated it once or twice a day. Illumination eluded her. The differing epistemologies of common-sense travelers and the authors of the customs regulations were symptomatic of primordial ontological confusions everywhere, perhaps. But what did that have to do with matters spiritual?  
At their next meeting, Celestia presented her with the Complete Works of Lewis Carroll. "Here," she said gravely, "is the condensed essence of Holy Cabala."  
She flushed angrily. "This time I know you're having me on," she said. "It isn't worthy of you."  
"So," Celestia said, "you know more than your Teacher already?"  
"I know a hoax, madame, when it's right in front of my nose."  
Celestia remained placid. "How many times," she asked, "have you encountered the saying, 'When the student is ready, the Master speaks?' Do you know why that is true? The door opens inward. The Master is everywhere, but the student has to open their mind to hear the Master's Voice. Read carefully, Twilight Sparkle, ponder the hidden meanings, and see if the Master does not speak to you through this book."  
Twilight, feeling more like an idiot than ever, took Lewis Carroll home and re-read all of it, cover to cover; and she was astonished at how much of it coincided with her own limited successes in astral projection. Were there even deeper meanings that would become clear when she had progressed farther in the Work?  
A few nights later she awoke from sleep convinced that she understood the Secret of Secrets. It was in one of Carroll's couplets:  
He thought he saw a banker's clerk descending from a bus;  
He looked again and saw it was a hippopotamus The elation lasted for several minutes. Then she looked at the cracked mirror and saw her own reflection split in two. The whole world split in shatters, broken glass and jewels. This time she knew the explosion was psychic: neither Wildeblood nor any of the other servants would hear the demolition.  
She got out of bed very carefully and lit a candle. Sitting in the windowseat, listening to the beating of her heart, trying to breathe normally, she was overwhelmed by the crack's sudden ability to change rhythmically from an acute angle to an obtuse angle while visions poured through of worlds with seven moons, worlds with nineteen suns, somadust and 358 and fnord, magick castles in the mist, paladins in white and black armor, aeons of the rhythmic alteration from acute angle to obtuse angle, vast insectoid intelligences, wider and wider vistas of planets, galaxies, whole universes profoundly alien, the Demon-Sultan howling in the darkness where the moon doesn't shine. "These dogs is cats and these mice is 3.141593, but those bloody garters are incest. Illigan Nillagain Rilligan Illagain. Eat a live toad before breakfast and nothing worse will happen to you all day." Twilight did exactly the right thing. From memory, concentrating deeply, ignoring the semenduets and obtuse rondels, she wrote in pen the five axioms and twenty-three definitions from Euclid's Geometry. Within half an hour she was in normal space-time again and the Lord of the Abyss of Hallucinations had been vanquished.

From the greatest horrors irony is seldom entirely absent, as if to remind us that there is in truth no such thing as motiveless or mindless malignity. Thus, the crack in Twilight's mirror inspired her, subtly and indirectly, to begin to accommodate herself somewhat to the twentieth century, but at the same time the hellish terrors of earlier centuries more insidiously gathered about her. The crack was only moderately disquieting at first - although she could not look into it without imagining she saw, in the distorted image of herself created by the jagged glass, some depressing and menacing symbol of the dark force which had attacked her through the weak spot opened up by her susceptibility to the voluptuous yearnings aroused, perhaps deliberately, by the enigmatic Lola and her brazenly casual allusions to the rhythm of the act of copulation and the red cobra of desire. She was haunted by an uncomfortable idea, although she tried to shake it off; it would be foolish certainly to accept it, on no better evidence than the coincidence of a bad dream and an earth tremor - yet the insidiously disturbing concept continued to grow in her mind: she had perhaps encountered a real witch, and the medieval world she had so long studied was seemingly coming to life around her.  
The bedroom itself was now insidiously depressing to her, because of the cracked mirror and its eldritch bicameral images, yet she was also subtly uncomfortable elsewhere about the huge old house, also: something distasteful and disquieting, almost a sense of decay and morbidity, appeared to permeate the very air; something nameless and vague, a mere adumbration of new presences and possibilities, probably only her own overactive imagination, and yet something that seemed autochthonous, virtually antediluvian, furtively suggestive of hideous secrets of forgotten times and deeds that were against Nature and against Scripture. The invasion of even the furniture with this inchoate omnipresence was bewildering, if one was able to compare, in the light of the different atmosphere before the Dark Force (as she came to call it), the previous ubiquity throughout Sparkle Manor of commonsense normalcy.  
Twilight continued to dream often of Chapel Perilous and once she found herself in a huge dungeon beneath the earth, where crowds of sullen and stupid persons argued and debated violently. "We shall have gno gods!" shouted some. But others shouted back, "We shall have gnu gods!" And weenie gothor thick haggard were poor. "There is no Chapel, there is no Grail, it is all a child's fantasy," muttered a liddel bho poop, yet veni verits, surd Alice war bear, flogging thor-talis behind them. "The tree ovus, the size of us, the weight of us," sang an Erring Go BRA in groinblancorange, but a triune pentagonal octupus explained, posing as somadust. "These are those who started on the Path without the Wand of Intuition. They have arrived, but they do not know it. They have I's so they no can see. Honey to them, pansy meals. Does a BRA shith in the woods?"  
When she wrote this dream into her Magickal Diary, he added the comment:  
For some reason I do not fully comprehend, I awoke with the conviction that Shakespeare was indeed an initiate of the Rose Croix. I feel closer and closer to grasping what he meant in saying that we are "such stuff as dreams are made of."  
A few nights later she allowed herself to be cajoled into a bridge game at Viscount Greystoke's, although that was precisely the sort of idiot pastime she generally despised. She barely endured the early part of the evening - there was much brandy, many cigars, and altogether too much talk about fox-hunting, a sport she despised as inhumane and barbaric. It was with great effort that she refrained from quoting the infamous Wilde's description of that bloody recreation as "the uneatable pursued by the unspeakable." Then, around ten, a strange thing happened: she suddenly remembered that the ordinary playing-card deck was derived from the Tarot. The spades were the Wands of Intuition, the hearts the Cups of Sympathy, the clubs the Swords of Reason, the diamonds the Pentacles of Valor: and the structure of the deck corresponded astrologically to fire signs, water signs, air signs and earth signs: 52 weeks in 4 seasons, 52 cards in 4 suits. But if Cabalistic signs were everywhere, the divine essence was also everywhere, and she remembered again that there were no places or times where the visible and invisible worlds did not meet and mingle: she saw the Buddha in everyone, again. The rest of the evening she was so intensely conscious that she seemed to herself to have been half-asleep all her life by comparison; she won trump after trump. The euphoria was with her for nearly a day and a half after, and then gave way to a vague anxiety again when she remembered that many forms of lunacy begin with such excited states of mentation in which every incident and event seems charged with more than human meaning.  
In London two days later Twilight met the bombastic American, Ezekiel (or Ezra) Pound - perhaps by accident - at the British Museum. Pound was carrying a Chinese-English dictionary and a batch of notebooks labeled "Fenollosa MS." and was effusively cordial. They amicably agreed to step out for a bite of lunch together.  
"Yeats is progressing nicely, under my influence," Pound pronounced grandly, over fish and chips. "He's coming out of that Celtic fog and beginning to write modern poetry." She found this self-importance hilarious, but managed to keep a straight face. She tactfully changed the subject.  
"Why are you so preoccupied by Chinese verse forms?" she asked in her most diffident manner.  
"Chinese," Pound pronounced, "will be as important to the twentieth century as Greek was to the Renaissance." And he went on for twenty minutes on that topic, before Twilight was able to interpolate a remark again.  
"Who was that young lady reciting Captain Fuller?" she asked, knowing that an evil impulse was driving her.  
Pound looked up sharply. "She says her name is Lola Levine and she comes from France," he replied. "I doubt it. Her French is worse than mine."  
"She sounded Australian. . ." Twilight said.  
"Exactly," Pound agreed. "A young lady one should not trust too much. Have you heard of Aleister Coltley?" he asked.  
Twilight remembered the name - one of the leaders of a renegade Golden Dawn faction said to have turned in the direction of Diabolism. "Vaguely," she said.  
"Well, whatever you've heard is probably unfavorable and you're just being Equestrian and tactful in not mentioning it," Pound said with a piercing glance. "Don't get too interested in Lola Levine, if you want any advice from me, Twilight. She is said to be, or to have been, one of Coltley's countless mistresses. Terrible things happen to people who get involved with Coltley, or his friends or mistresses. Have you heard of Victor Neuberg?"  
"A young poet. . . I'm afraid I haven't read any of his work."  
"Victor Neuberg got very involved with Clotley a few years ago," Pound said. "He is now recovering, slowly and painfully, from a complete nervous and mental breakdown."  
"A mental breakdown," Twilight repeated. "You mean. . ."  
"That's what the doctors call it," Pound said somberly. "Neuberg believes he is under siege by demons."  
"Oh," she said, "how ghastly."  
"Yes," Pound answered with a level stare. "That's the sort of thing that happens to people who get too close to Coltley and Lola Levine and their circle. Neuberg even claims Coltley once turned him into a camel."  
"Into a camel?" Twilight exclaimed.  
"Well," Pound said, "I suppose it would be more traditional to turn him into a toad, but Coltley by all accounts has a singularly eccentric sense of humor."  
"Do you believe Neuberg really did turn into a camel?" she asked, wondering just what Pound's attitude toward all this really was.  
"Hellfire, no!" Pound laughed scornfully. "But I do believe that if you get mixed up with a gang like that, and really get into yoga and meditation and group sex and drugs and howling invocations at Sirius, you'll damned soon end up believing whatever the other lunatics in the group believe."  
On that note, the lunch ended and they parted. Twilight found herself wondering if she was ready, yet, to believe in the metamorphosis of a pony into a camel. The idea seemed to belong not to the true tradition of mysticism as she had come to know it through the Gilded Rise, but to the realm of folklore, witchcraft and old-wives' tales: and yet the disquieting thought remained, trailing her about like an unpaid usurer, Something happened to poor Neuberg, something that the alienists are perhaps not ready yet to understand or heal. If we are such stuff as dreams are made of, these eldritch forces which Macbeth so evocatively calls "night's black agents" are as powerful as anything in the masquerade of social life with its timid decorums and deceptions; and thinking also, There is Cabalistic logic in it: the camel corresponds to the Hebrew letter gimmel, which corresponds to the Masked Priestess in the Tarot, the guide across the Abyss of Hallucinations to the undivided light of Pure Illumination.  
It was only another accident, of course - only another coincidence - but Twilight actually encountered Lola Levine in Rupert Street later that afternoon. There was no mistaking that blue coat, those strange eyes, that enticingly voluptuous figure to unhood the cobra of desire. By Goddess' Grace, she didn't notice her and she passed by quickly, hardly thinking of her petticoats and garters and those things.  
That evening, however, she encountered her again, in a much more outr manner. She was performing his fourth exercise in astral projection for the day, according to the instructions in the Gilded Rise manual, and, for the third time since she had begun the practice, she achieved a state of mind where it almost believed it was real.  
["It seemed real," she had told Celestia after the first such experience, "but I cannot be sure. I think I am perhaps just deceiving myself and it is imagination."  
["Pray do not let that bother you," Celestia had replied. "It always begins as imagination. . ."]  
This time, Twilight, eyes tightly closed, was imagining her astral mind rising out of her body, looking down at the whole room - her physical body included - from some eerie vantage point near the ceiling, and beginning, again, to almost believe her imagination. Following instructions, she projected higher, above the earth, looking down at her estate from a great height, and then, projecting higher, looking down at Equestria and parts of Europe. With a colossal effort, she projected higher and saw the blinding white light of the sun (behind the Earth at this hour) and the planets Mercury, Venus and Mars. It was going so well that she projected out of the solar system entirely and approached the realms of Yesod, the first astral plane.  
And there it was, just as described in the Cabalistic books of many centuries: the two pillars of Night and Day, the masked Priestess seated on the throne: Shekinah, the embodied Glory of Jehovah.  
"Who dares to approach this realm?" She asked, Her voice strangely familiar. (Or was he imagining all this? Was this practice just a trick to contact the unconscious by "dreaming" while still partly conscious?)  
"I am one who seeks the Light," Twilight answered, according to formula.  
"You have turned your back on the Light," She answered sharply, Her eyes seeming to shine or glow in an odd manner. "You have rejected Me and banded together with the Black Brothers who hate and despise My creation. Infernal nochts; rocks intangible."  
"No, no," Twilight said, frantically reminding herself of the First Teaching ["Fear is failure, and the forerunner of failure"]. I have never rejected You."  
"You have rejected the female, My representatives on Earth, and the act of joy and love which is My Sacrament. You can never pass this Gate until you conquer your fear of Woman. Fear is failure and the forerunner of failure.  
Twilight recognized Her voice at last: it was the voice of Lola Levine. Desperately, she plunged backward toward Earth, remembering to try to calm herself: when one is blinded by panic, the teachings said, one might not be able to find one's way back to the Earth-body. In total funk, she briefly found herself in one of the alchemical planes, where a White Eagle, a Red Lion, a Golden Unicorn and Sir Talischlange pursued her through a magickal wood and the trees chanted rhythmically, "Pangenitor, Panphage, Pangenitor, Panphage, Pangenitor, Panphage. . ." Lola's voice sang in antichorus, "Io Pan! Io Pan Pan! Io Pan! Io Pan Pan!" Then, somehow, she was whirling down, down, through endless darkness, to the White Light of the sun again, the spinning Earth-globe, Equestria, her own estate, and the bedroom in which she found herself seated, sweating, with her heart beating wildly.  
Her back was cold from the sweat, and the astral heat burned her forehead; she was trembling. She repeated the Mantra of Protection three times before she was able to feel safe again.  
"If anything particularly glorious or particularly frightening happens, write it down at once," Celestia had instructed her. "That gets the linear, rational mind operating again - and the record will be useful to you, later."  
Twilight performed a banishing ritual first, to be on the safe side, and then wrote the vision carefully in her Magick Diary. She added:  
If this was just my own unconscious mind playing tricks, it is still most interesting. The chorus and antichorus invoking Pan seems to suggest that the unconscious can compose Greek poetry much more rapidly than my conscious mind could. And the ideational content of the chant - Pangenitor, all-creator; Panphage, all-destroyer - clearly indicates the identity of Pan and the Hindu god, Shiva, which is most curious, since I had never consciously understood that identity before this Vision.  
I can only conclude that the above attempt at reductionism is very forced and not really convincing. Deep down I know that what happened was not merely unconscious tricks of my mind. Because my heart is not pure, because I harbor lust and carnal desire, I missed the true gate of Yesod. I did not encounter Shekinah, the female component of Jehovah, as would have happened if my heart were clean. I encountered Ashtoreth, the female Devil, and true to Her nature, She attempted to psychically seduce me. Many alchemists recorded similar meetings with the succubus, or female lust-demon.  
She tore out the page. Twilight repeated her banishing ritual, and gave up on astral projection for the night. She allowed herself a rather stiff brandy, to relax, and another, even stiffer, brandy before bedtime.  
We do not escape our demons that easily. Twilight dreamed many things, all of them voluptuous and sensual. She wandered through jeweled and many-colored harems where Victorian newbuggers in honeysuits with camelly pants engaged in vile, nameless perversions, obscenities she had encountered before only in the evasive Latin euphemisms of Krafft-Ebing. She was wandering through the gardens of her uncle, and a dark serpentine Sicilian named Giacomo Palamino (who claimed to be related, distantly, to herself) was explaining earnestly something totally incomprehensible about Sex and Creation. "The male is space and the female is time," he said "but of course, the universe itself is bisexual."  
The clowns and acrobats sang "I Never Risk Inquiry," but Yeats and Twilight were back at Pound's flat. Yeats whispered suggestively, "The culprits are bears. It's always darkest just before the storm." He was leading Twilight to another garden, past the hall of infinitely reflecting mirrors, and the Countess of Soulsburied was waiting there for her, with a face much like Lola's. She was sprawled totally naked, except for a blue garter with a silver star, on her left thigh. Coldly nude on a crimson-jeweled Arabic purrpurplebed, her left hand lewdly moving in the grove of brown hair above that maddening garter, doing that horrid disgusting thing to herself, to gather per darker bane, a bolt like a brick sheet hose, her face flushed with the same unbearable and inhuman rapture as the famous statue of Saint Teresa in Rome. "To the puer, all things are puella," Yeats mumbled, vanishing with myriad reflections into infinite mirrors.  
Twilight threw herself upon Lola, kissing the garter rapturously, mad with hatred, love and desire, and she whispered, "All things are Buddha. Evil to him who thinks evil of it." And her thighs were wrapping around her, sucking her down, down, down into ecstasy so intense she cared not if it were divine or diabolical.  
"Little check on her? Liddel chick honor?" Sir Talis Saur chanted. "If god is dog spelled backward," he hissed, lisping, "what does that mean? Not the Almighty?" But Twilight was fucking a fox-bitch in heat, groveling in the mire: mind and heart and soul lost in the Night of Pan.  
Her heart beating wildly, Twilight shot up from sleep, moaning, the evidence of the evening dark and dank on her pajama crotch.  
Twilight decided to return the missing page to her diary.


End file.
